Falling Into Infinity
by GougeAway
Summary: It takes him six days to remember her. Rangiku finds Gin alive and reborn in the world of the living. GinRan one-shot, complete. May contain a coffee shop and a lot of chat about persimmons.


(A/N: I've been hopelessly scouring looking for a fic like this since forever, and decided to just buckle down and write it myself. As far as the context of this story goes, assume Matsumoto has been issued a super long assignment in the living world and has a lot of time to visit coffee shops and meet sexy men. Enjoy and all that.)

**Falling Into Infinity**

_-1_

On the first day, her eyes are the first thing he notices about her.

Well… that's not entirely true. He pulls his eyes up to meet her face as she staggers towards the shop counter, arms weighed down with so many shopping bags that she's practically dragging them across the polished wooden floor. She finally reaches the counter and drops her bags with the most drawn out, exaggerated sigh he's ever heard before collapsing onto a bar stool and slamming her head and arms on the polished counter.

He should be irritated by her dramatics; by this woman who has crashed through the doors of his coffee shop and still hasn't deigned to even look at him, but he finds himself too inexplicably amused by her. The air around him feels brighter and faster than it did before, somehow; as if something in the world has shifted and clicked into place. She's like solid, glittering gold in a monochrome room. The smile comes easily. "How can I help ya ma'am?"

She jumps suddenly as if his voice is an alarm bell and sits up, the sharp features of her face leaving the comfort of her forearms to level with his. Her shoulder length blonde hair flies to the side and, along with absently wondering if she'll fall off her seat or something, he's struck by the thought that her hair suits her better this way. Better than what, he can't quite put his finger on. But it's nice, he knows that much.

Her eyes are gunmetal blue. He knows because they're staring up at him, wide and glittering and, for an awkward moment, he thinks she's going to cry. She doesn't. It takes a split second to compose herself, to wipe away the strange expression on her features and croak out "A hazelnut latte, please," but he saw it all the same.

Those eyes, they howl. They scream. There is a sadness there, some deep-seated grief that he can't touch or taste or understand. It looks foreign on her, even when he knows he's never seen her before in his life. It doesn't suit her. There's a terrible sense of loose ends left untied, of good left undone in the air between them, and he doesn't know what it is.

But she's shooting him a tentative, wary smile now, and he's been staring at her. He smiles back, tipping his head at her in acknowledgement before turning away from her and busying himself with her order. Her eyes burn into his back all the while.

_- 1_

It's been hours since the woman finished off her coffee in silence. She hasn't moved an inch, but seems busy enough on her phone – until he spares a glance at it from over her shoulder and sees a black screen. She just sits there, the cold remnants of her hazelnut latte sitting before her as she watches him serve other customers and manage the cash till.

He wonders absently what she's doing. Is she waiting for someone? Has she been stood up? He dismisses the thought instantly; anyone would be insane to stand her up. He looks at her again, and there is the briefest flash of blue on blue before she hurriedly bows her blonde head and stares into her empty coffee glass. She looks like she just doesn't want to leave, like she could sit in that one spot forever. He thinks he sort of knows how she feels.

He's about to ask her if she wants a refill when her phone buzzes, and she yelps at the sudden interruption. He laughs before he can stop himself and she glares at him indignantly before her face softens for the briefest of seconds and she glances down at her phone; probably more to hide her embarrassment than anything else, he decides.

Whatever the text she's just received says, she's on her feet in a flash. "How much for the latte?" she asks him, her hands scrambling in her pockets for yen and pulling out a fistful of notes.

"It's on me." He doesn't know what makes him say it, and he feels as surprised as she looks by the gesture. She stares at him, and then a smile curls her lips at the corners; real and genuine and not the anxious one she gave him earlier and he thinks, _that one, that's it. _

She thanks him, and he matches her smile with a watermelon one of his own, before turning away from her to put the charge through on his own card.

He doesn't see her put four times the cost of her coffee into the tip jar before she says goodbye and walks briskly out of the door.

He spends the remaining twenty minutes of his shift staring absently at the space she had occupied, and which now seemed to gape in her absence.

_- 2_

The next day, he's surprised when she comes back and offers to buy him a coffee.

"Ya don't have ta do that ma'am," he smiles – not his customer smile, either – and she narrows her eyes slightly at him. He wonders if she's mimicking him.

"You bought mine yesterday when you saw I was rushed for time. Now what are you having?" She sits down in the same seat she occupied yesterday and he kind of wants to laugh. She's stubborn; he somehow already knew that about her the instant she walked in yesterday. She raises a perfectly plucked eyebrow at him. "Well?"

He keeps smiling – something that seems to make her happy and sad all at once – and politely declines her offer again. "Ya don't owe me anythin', ma'am," he says, "but I appreciate the gesture."

She looks him in the eye for a few seconds longer, as if to challenge him, before resorting to more underhanded tactics. "Fine," she sighs dramatically, and cups her face in her hands, creamy elbows propped up on the counter. "I'll just have to buy two and hope one of them doesn't go cold."

In the end, he drinks the coffee. Not because he's crazy about cinnamon lattes or because he cares about fulfilling whatever debt the woman thinks she owes him, but rather because this brash, stubborn friendliness of hers was so much more welcome than the unending grief he saw in her yesterday.

_- 3_

On the third day, he sees her sitting in her allocated seat before he has even arrived to work. He sees her through the glass as he walks towards the coffee shop doors from the busy city street, her back to him and her head turning briefly towards the direction of the clock on the left wall. He wonders, suddenly, if she's waiting for him - and if she has then how long has she sat there? – and pushes the idea down before it has a chance to form.

"Hello again ma'am," he almost sings somewhere close to her ear, and before she has a chance to turn around he's breezed past her and towards the staff room already.

"It's not 'ma'am'," she says to him plainly when he returns to his place behind the counter a few minutes later, coat and wallet safely locked away in the staff room. "You make me sound old."

"Sorry ma'am," he says, and he knows, somehow _just knows_, that she can tell he's feigning this politeness and on some level just wants to see her flustered. He knows that she knows him. "What should I call you?"

She smiles crookedly at him. "I'm Matsumoto Rangiku." She looks at him a moment, almost as if expecting some sort of reaction from him, before saying, "And you?"

He tells her his name and she looks at him, really looks, and he wonders what she sees in him, before he asks her what she'd like.

"Hm," she muses, and scans the drinks menu on the wall above her head. She hasn't bought the same drink twice, he's noticed, and finds himself amused and wondering what she'll order this time. "I think I want black coffee. Yeah. Black coffee. No sugar or anything."

"Comin' up, Ran-chan," he smiles, the name spilling from his mouth as easily and effortlessly as water, and he doesn't know how he ever thought her name could be anything else.

For the next few hours she sips her coffee in silence, sometimes engaging him in idle small talk before lapsing back into a quiet kind of contentedness. It feels different compared to yesterday, when she more or less acted like a spoiled brat and amused him to no end. He thinks maybe a piece of that unbearable sadness he saw in her two days previously has swallowed her; but then he stops and looks at her, and she's looking back at him almost curiously. Questioning, not despairing. She seems pensive, thoughtful more than anything else, and it's a personality he wouldn't necessarily have associated with her at first glance, but which is a good look on her all the same.

She watches him a little longer as he works.

He watches her too.

_- 4_

On the fourth day, quite out of the blue, she asks him if he likes persimmons.

"Persimmons?" he repeats, unsure whether he heard her correctly.

"Persimmons," she clarifies, eyebrows raised as if impatiently expecting an answer, as if it's not a strange question. "Dried persimmons. Do you like them?"

"I've never tried 'em," he says, and wishes he had given a different reply when he sees her face fall, too-blue eyes cast down to stare into her cappuccino, before she looks up at him again a split second later with this soft, knowing smile that makes something inside him twist and turn and she says,

"You love them. I mean," she shakes her head a little, correcting her slip of the tongue, "I think you'd love them."

_- 5_

"Try them!" she says on the fifth day, shoving a brown paper bag towards him before taking out some sort of oversized, flat, orangey raisin from the bag and biting down on it.

He gives her a crooked smile from his side of the counter. "What are they?"

She looks at him incredulously, not bothering to swallow her mouthful before shouting, "Dried persimmons! It's one thing never having tried one, but I can't believe you don't know what they look like! Haven't you ever seen one?!"

"Should I have?" he laughs slightly. A couple of customers in the corner are glancing their way due to Rangiku's outburst, but he finds he doesn't care.

"Of course not, you're only _Japanese is all!_" she snorts, and he's kind of delighted that she's capable of sarcasm. He didn't really expect that. She finally swallows the piece in her mouth and waves the bag at him. "Go on then, try one!"

And he doesn't have the heart to tell her that eating food from outside the store isn't allowed, and that if she wants to eat her dried persimmons she'll need to eat them outside. Because, what a stupid rule, and because she looks yellow with joy. And it's really more for her benefit than his when he dips his hand into the bag and takes out one of these dried persimmon things.

"What does it taste like anyway. Ran-chan?"

She beams up at him and says, "I can't even tell you. I don't even know. It's like no other fruit you've ever eaten, and you're going to love it." And with that solid reassurance, he bites down.

Rangiku's right. It's like no fruit he's ever tasted, but in the best possible way. It looks like an orange mixed with a raisin and it tastes as sharp as an apple and as sweet as a plum with the texture of jelly. He doesn't know, really. But it's instantly become the best thing he's ever eaten.

He thinks he must have had one before. He can't remember, but he knows he's tasted that before, and looked at her face before, and experienced this one moment over and over again before. This explosion of colour in his mouth and the blinding brightness of her smile as she shares it with him. She's grinning up at him now and somehow, he doesn't know, but she looks like a child. She looks like a little girl with a smile too big for her face and a laugh too loud for her skinny, malnourished body.

But he blinks, and the Rangiku he's known for only five days is looking up at him expectantly, and she's not a little girl and her smile is perfect and she's definitely well grown. "Well?" she says impatiently, and her excitement is contagious and he wants to grab onto it and tie it around them and float away with her. "What do you think?"

He responds by devouring the persimmon in two large bites, and reaches his hand back into the bag.

_- 6_

On the sixth day, she finds him on the bar stool beside hers. She slides onto her seat before turning to look at him in interest, a playful tone in her voice as she asks him "Don't you ever get a day off?"

He looks back to her, and he feels like this is the brightest smile he's ever worn, as if it could split his face from sheer joy. "This _is_ my day off," he replies casually. And before she can open her mouth and shakily ask him why he's here _(for her?)_ he looks her in the eyes and says, "I know you, don't I?"

She stares at him. She's staring him straight in his ocean blue eyes and the expression on her face is so profound, so achingly beautiful, that he wants to stop time and memorise her face because it's so rare to see her lost for words. That grief he saw in her is gone. Not merely hidden, not clouded over by more dominant feelings; it's gone completely and he knows he did that for her.

And he finds that he doesn't even need her to answer. The way she looks at him now, as if the last piece of her puzzle has finally slotted into place, clarifies it for him. He doesn't know how, or when, but he's known her for lifetimes. This, he knows innately and instinctively. He doesn't need an explanation from her, or from the universe or any greater power that gave her back to him. He can't remember her before she crashed through those doors and into his life six days ago, but he feels as if his soul itself remembers her, as if they go beyond life and death and just exist together. As if there was some hole in his life that he didn't notice until she filled it. As if the world is finally righting itself for some wrong he hadn't seen before.

She grips his hands in hers and laces her fingers through his. "You know me," she whispers. "And I know you." And it's enough. They're falling into infinity, and he doesn't mind it at all.


End file.
